In November each year, since 2002, 100,000 free copies of a book have been distributed in Vienna. Eine STADT ein BUCH. (English)

In 2007, looking forward to 2008, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch was chosen, which fits in with the Euro 2008 Football Championship in Austria and Switzerland.

3SAT had a half-hour program on the book. We saw Nick Hornby reading in English.

But who did the German translation?

None of those people would have read the book if it hadn’t been translated into German. So I thought I would do a search and name the translator. But I can’t find the name anywhere.

Books to date (Wikipedia):

2002 – Frederic Morton: Ewigkeitsgasse
Frederic Morton ist ein im Jahre 1924 in Wien geborener Schriftsteller. Er beschrieb in seinem Roman „Ewigkeitsgasse“ das Leben einer jüdischen Familie in einer fiktiven Gegend in Wien

2003 – Imre Kertész: Schritt für Schritt.
Dieses Buch ist eigentlich ein Drehbuch zum Roman eines Schicksallosen, für den Kertész den Nobelpreis für Literatur erhielt

2004 – Johannes Mario Simmel: Das geheime Brot
Johannes Mario Simmel wurde 1924 in Wien geboren. Schauplatz seines 1950 erschienenen Romans „Das geheime Brot“ ist das Wien der Nachkriegszeit, wo Simmel damals als Kulturredakteur tätig war.

2005 – John Irving: Laßt die Bären los!
John Irving studierte in den Jahren 1962 bis 1963 in Wien und begann hier seinen ersten Roman „Laßt die Bären los!“ (Originaltitel: Setting Free the Bears).

2006 – Toni Morrison: Sehr blaue Augen
Die afroamerikanische Literaturnobelpreisträgerin Toni Morrison schrieb 1970 ihren ersten Roman: „Sehr blaue Augen“ (Originaltitel: The Bluest Eye). Er handelt vom Schicksal eines schwarzen Mädchens in den USA der 1940er Jahre.

2007 – Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch
Nick Hornbys Debütroman über einen Fußballfan wurde als Vorbote der in Österreich und der Schweiz stattfindenden Fußball-Europameisterschaft 2008 ausgewählt.

LATER NOTE: The translators of Fever Pitch are Marcus Geiss and Henning Stegelmann – thanks to hp lehofer in the comments.

Video of a bimbo box in Cologne: a juke box with mechanical monkey musicians in a glass case.

(Via Eye of the Goof, thanks to Trevor)

The Guardian considers the hype of Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete.

For whether it is the fantasies about sex, the polemics against the use of deodorants, the avocado cores grown specially for use in masturbation, or the detailed and inventive passages of scatological or genital description, Wetlands has left few indifferent.

This seems to be the only hit for the curious term avocado core on a UK site. It sounds a bit like an apple core. It seems to mean Avocadokern/avocado pit or avocado stone.

I read once that German dishes like Sauerbraten could be traced back to Roman tastes in food. That would explain Chinese sweet and sour dishes, Currywurst, and also Toast Hawaii, which was something curiously popular in Germany (and known as Karlsbader Schnitte in the GDR).

The Independent reports that Hawaii Toast was actually the creation of a TV cook called Clemens Wilmenrod in the 50s. He was also responsible for popularizing Rumtopf.

Now a TV film is being made about him.

More in Spiegel Online English German

In the Times Literary Supplement of May 16 2008, Ritchie Robertson searches Austrian literature for examples of men who terrorized or imprisoned their families. The article is available online too.

Adalbert Stifter: Turmalin 1852
Franz Nabl: Das Grab des Lebendigen 1917 – later reissued as Die Ortliebschen Frauen
Ferdnand Raimund: Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind 1828
Johann Nestroy: Eine Wohnung ist zu vermeten in der Stadt 1837
Elias Canetti: Die Blendung 1935
Veza Canetti: Die gelbe Straße 1932-3

Robertson finds that John Fowles’s The Collector has more to do with class, whereas the Austrian examples relate to the father’s Züchtigungsrecht – right to chastise his family. He finishes by finding that some of Freud’s famous cases were surprisingly soft on the fathers and insensitive to the mothers.

Paul Beckett, of Mannin Chambers on the Isle of Man, must be the most-tattooed lawyer in the British Isles (the IoM is not part of the UK, nor a full part of the EU, and has its own legal system, albeit close to English law).

Here’s a picture from a recent exhibition at Mall Galleries:

For more, see the article on My Weekend in the Times Online.